EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: MARIA W. MILLER STEWART P/51

                                                                                    Read Part One HERE

In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Maria W. Miller Stewart. She lived from 1803 - 1879. After moving to New York City, Maria remained an activist, attending for example, the 1837 Women's Anti-Slavery Convention, but she never again spoke in public. She supported herself by teaching in public schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn and eventually became an assistant principal of the Williamsburg School in Brooklyn.

Apparently after losing her teaching position in New York, Maria moved to Baltimore in 1852 or 1853. There she taught privately. In 1861, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she taught school again during the Civil War.

Around 1870 Maria was appointed to head housekeeping at the Freedmen's Hospital and Asylum in Washington D.C. Following Sjourner Truth in the post, she managed the cleaning staff.

In 1878 when she was seventy-five, Maria began receiving an eight-dollar-a-month widow's pension based on her husband's service in the U.S. Navy in the First World Was. She used the pension to republish her book "Meditations from the Pen of Mrs Maria W. Stewart." The book was published just before her death on December 17, 1879. 

Read Part Fifty-Two HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: MARIA W. MILLER STEWART P/50

                                                                                    Read Part One HERE

In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Maria W. Miller Stewart. She lived from 1803 - 1879.

In her first lecture, in April 1832, Maria spoke before a women-only audience at the African Female Intelligence Society, an institution founded by the free black community of Boston. Speaking to that audience, she used the Bible to defend her right to speak and lectured on religion, justice and equality.

On September 1832, Maria delivered a second lecture, this time to an audience that also included men. She spoke at Franklin Hall, the site of the New England Anti-Slavery Society Meetings. She called for civil rights for northern blacks and questioned emigration to Africa, which was then promoted by the American Colonization Society.

On February 27, 1833, Maria delivered her third public lecture, "African Rights and Liberty." Her fourth and final Boston lecture, before moving to New York was a "Farewell Adress" on September 21, 1833, when she addressed the negative reaction that her public speaking had provoked, expressing both her dismay at having little effect, and her sense of divine call to speak publicly.

Read Part Fifty-One HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: Mary W. Miller Stewart P/49

                                                                                    Read Part One HERE

In this post I focus on a woman named Mary W. Miller Stewart. She lived from 1803- 1879. Mary was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She was orphaned by age five and became an indentured servant, seving a clergyman until she was fifteen. She also attended Connecticut Sabbath schools and taught herself to read and write.

In 1826 Mary married James W. Stewart. Her husband, a shipping agent, had served in the First World War and had spent some time in England as a prisoner of war. With her marriage, she became part of Boston's small free black middle class and soon became involved in some of its Institutions, including the Massachusetts General Coloured Association, which worked for immediate abolition of slavery. 

Soon after Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison established his newspaper, the Liberator, in January 1831, he specifically called for black women to write in its pages. Mary was the first woman to respond, and by the summer of 1831, he published her first essay "Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality," as a pamphlet. Mary launched her public speaking career at a time when women were banned from speaking in public, especially to audiences that included men.

Read Part Fifty HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: MARY ANN WILSON MCCLINTOCK P/48

 Read Part One HERE

In this post I continue to focus on Mary Ann Wilson McClintock. She lived from 1800 - 1884.

As for the First Women's Rights Convention, hundreds of women crowded into the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. The chapel had been the scene of many reform lectures and was considered the only large building in the area that would open its doors to a women's rights convention.

Although the convention had invited only women for the first day, men were not turned away. As a result, forty-two men were part of the 300-member assembly. On that day Elizabeth Cady Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal...."

On the second day of the First Women's Rights Convention, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass made a powerful speech that unified the causes of the abolition of slavery and women's rights. Later that day, members of the convention voted on the Declaration of Sentiments. One hundred attendees signed the document making it legitimate, and the women's rights movement officially began.

Mary Ann and her husband continued to be actively involved in the movement they had helped to start. When the Second Women's Rights Convention opened in Rochester three weeks later, May Ann and her daughter Elizabeth were in attendance. Abigail Bush was chosen to be president of the meeting.

In 1856 Mary Ann and her husband returned to Philadelphia, where Mary Ann died 1884 at the age of 84. 

Read Part Forty-Nine HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: MARY ANN WILSON MCCLINTOCK P/47

                                                                     Read Part One HERE

In this story I continue to focus on a woman named Mary Ann Wilson McClintock. She lived from 1800 - 1884. She was one of five women who joined Jane Hunt for tea at her Waterloo home, including Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The women expressed their discontent with their place in American society and decided to hold a Women's Rights Convention. This was to be held in Seneca Falls, New York.

She hosted a second planned meeting at her house on July 16, when she, two of her daughters, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted a document called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson seventy-two years earlier, this document proclaimed that "all men and women are created equal."

The Declaration of Sentiments would be ratified on the seond day of the First Woman's Rights Convention and signed by one hundred attendees: sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. As one of the first statements of the political and social repression of American women, Sentiments met with significant hostility and marked the beginning of the women's rights movement in the United States.

Read Part Forty-Eight HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: MARY ANN WILSON MCCLINTOCK P/46

                                                                     Read Part One HERE

In this story I focus on a woman named Mary Ann Wilson McClintock. She lived from 1800 - 1884. Mary Ann was born in Burlington, New Jersey, of Quaker parents. She attended Westtown School in 1814 for one year. She married Thomas McClintock in 1820 and moved with him to 107 South Nine Street, his store in Philadelpia. They lived in Philadelphia for the first seventeen years of their marriage. Mary Ann and her husband were active members of the Philadelphia Quaker community and were recognised by their meetings as leaders.

Mary Ann and her family moved to Waterloo, New York, sometime in 1835-1836, where Thomas had purchased a drugstore. He later added a stationery and a book section. At the store, anti-slavery petitions were circulated, temperance meetings were held, and a school was run in two rooms above the drugstore.

Mary Ann and her husband became active members in several social reform movements in Western New York - the abolition of slavery and temperance. She and her husband offered their home to fugitive slaves as a station on the Underground Railroad. 

In 1842 Mary Ann and her husband became founding members of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and helped write its constitution.

Read Part Forty-Seven HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: EMILIE MALLET P/45

                                                                      Read Part One HERE

In this post I will focus on a woman named Emilie Mallet. She lived from 1794 -1856. She was a woman of great moral integrity, who spent her life helping children prisoners and the sick.

She was the daughter of Christopher Oberkampf, who had founded the factory which produced the famous Toile de Jouy (a kind of printed cotton). Her father-in-law was Guillaume Mallet, the manager of the Banque de France. 

In 1826, she opened several infants' schools, inspired by the English models; these" shelters" were the nursery schools of the future, taking in children from 2 to 6 years old, mostly from working-class backgrounds.

During the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849, she took children into her own home and kept them in a building which she rented out in Jouy-en-Josas.

In 1838, she organised a committee of women who visted the St Lazare prison and helped to develop the charity which cared for those coming out of prison, run by the Diaconesses.

Emilie was a model wife and mother. However, in addition to this, she wanted to witness to her faith (which was strongly influenced by the Revival movement) in all her activities. She took on positions of responsibility in society, involving other women of her social level as well. In fact, she instigated an awareness of social problems which led other wives of prominent businessmen to take part in associations to help those in need. She died in 1856.

Read Part Forty-Six HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: LUCRETIA COFFIN MOTT P/44

                                                               Read Part One HERE

In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Lucretia Coffin Mott. She lived from 1793 - 1880.

In 1848, taking up the cause of women's right, Lucretia and Elizabeth Cady Standon, called a convention at Seneca Falls, the first of its kind, "to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women." The convention issued a "Declaration of Sentiments" modeled on the Declaration of Independence: it stated that "all men and women are created equal" and included a list of 18 women-specific demands. These included divorce, property and custody rights, as well as the right to vote. The latter fueled the launching of the woman suffrage movement. Following the convention, Lucretia continued her crusade for women's equality by speaking at ensuing annual women's right conventions and publishing "Discourse on Women," a reasoned account of the history of women's repression.

Her devotion to women's rights did not deter her from fighting for an end to slavery. She and her husband protested the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and helped an enslaved person escape bondage a few years later. In 1866. Lecretia became the first president of the Americal Equal Right Association. She joined with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in decrying the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution for granting the vote to black men but not to women. Lucretia was also involved with efforts to establish Swarthmore College and was instrumental in ensuring it was co-educational. Dedicated to all forms of human freedom, Lucretia argued as ardently for women's rights as for black rights, including suffrage, education and economic aid. She played a major role in the woman suffrage movement through her life.Her last address was given to the Friend's annual meeting in May 1880.She died later that year.

Read Part Forty-Five HERE